Thanks for your patience everyone! We were finally able to extract the winners and the lot of you are from all over, which is an exciting testament to waze’s global growth. A big congratulations to these users on their win: iann from Australia, Mee2 from the Czech Republic, ramik79 from Italy, partycat from the UK, mapcat, deejamahl & mizter6 from the US, PYJ59 from France, tomdler from Germany and hartvarken from the Netherlands – check your inboxes for an email from us  :)

The people have spoken! Of the 19 complete submissions in our Video Demo Contest, a few thousand of you made your voices heard picked the video demos submitted by Walter from the US, Andrey from Belarus and Ian from the UK. Congrats fellas! You can check out Walter’s above, who came in #1, and check out the rest of the submissions here, at least for the next few days. Many thanks to everyone for your participation, as always you guys did a great job!

Have an extra 16 minutes and four seconds to spare? You’ll definitely want to check our Di-Ann’s talk at Where 2.0 entitled “Game Mechanics and LBS: Crossing the LBS Chasm”. She details the different phases of Waze’s growth and how we use game mechanics to make our service better.  Di-Ann’s talk is a great peek ‘behind the curtain’ into not just our successes, but also a few fails. If you want some idea of what happens behind the scenes over here, it’s a great video to watch…

Even though you guys seem to still be running over the Easter bunnies and Easter eggs with delight, we just wanted to give you a heads-up, letting you know that there’ll be a short delay in announcing the winners of the goodiehunt. We hope to get the list of those who have won up at some point on Tuesday, and if we’re not able to, we’ll update this blog posting to keep you in the loop. Have fun with it in the few hours left to munch!

UPDATE: We’re not going to be able to announce the winners today, in the end. We’ll do our best to make that info available on Wednesday – thanks for your patience, everyone!

Due to some hiccups this morning in Amazon, our usually trusty and reliable data center, our service has been down in the US and Canada. It looks like several other popular websites and services such as Foursquare, Reddit, and Qoara have been affected as well. We are working with Amazon support to solve the problem and hope to be up and running again as soon as possible. Don’t forget to miss us a plenty while we’re gone!

Like usual, you guys never fail to impress us. The Waze Video Demo Contest submissions were fantastic! So fantastic, in fact, that we decided to let all 19 complete entries (who were the other 57 of you with incomplete entries?!) through to the next round. That means that it’s the sole responsibility of the Waze community to pick those that they think are best for the win. And what’s even cooler? Unlike most of our regular contests where “There can be only One”, this time there will be three winners! You’re allowed to vote for your 3 favorites once per day through the end of the contest on Friday, April 22nd, so make your voice heard! Click here to watch ‘em all and get voting…

Remember the fun you had participating in easter egg hunts as a kid? Well, now’s the time to reenact those happy memories out on the road with Waze’s Easter Roadgoodie Hunt. Grab the kiddies (if you have any) and hit the road with the intention to collect the full set of five goodies. For each complete set you munch, you’ll get one raffle ticket for your chance to win a brand new iPod Touch! We’re giving away 10 of ‘em, so the chances are pretty sweet this time around…

Here’s how to participate:

• Download the newest version of Waze by visiting the iPhone Appstore, the Android Market, or your device’s app store.
• Make sure you’re a registered user with a valid email address on file – you can check or update this under ‘Settings’
• Then simply munch as many road goodies as you can! This time around we have bunnies (5 pts.), Easter baskets (8 pts.), blue eggs (10 pts.), pink eggs (20 pts.) and the slightly more elusive golden eggs (25 pts.). Note that the more points each goodie is worth, the more rare it will be on the map.
• For each complete set of five you’ll be awarded one raffle ticket. There is no limit to the amount of complete sets (and therefore raffle tickets) that you can rack up for yourself. Be aware that after munching one kind of road goodie, you can collect the same roadgoodie again and it will count towards your next set.
• At the end of the game, we’ll conduct a raffle among all eligible users, and will give away 10 brand new iPods (Touch 8GB).

During the contest, if you’d like a status update to better know where you stand, simply log onto the ‘My Dashboard’ section of the Waze website to see:

• How many complete sets of 5 you have
• How many days are left in the contest
• How many goodies are needed to complete your next set of 5 - and which roadgoodies those are.

The easiest and safest way to visit your dashboard is on www.waze.com/dashboard (for US and Canada) or world.waze.com/dashboard (for anywhere else in the world), and we recommend logging into your dashboard from a computer, rather than from your smartphone. Note that you’ll need to log in to the dashboard using your waze username and password. If you don’t remember your username, check under Settings>Profile in the Waze app for that information – you can also register there if you haven’t done so already. ‘My Dashboard’ is also the place to update your email address if it has changed since the time that you initially registered with us. Lastly, if you don’t recall your password, visit www.waze.com/forgot_password.

That’s about it!

We’ll let you guys go for the gold all the way through Sunday, April 24^th, and we’ll draw the winners and announce them here on the blog, April 25^th. Hope you have lotsa fun out there searching for bunnies, baskets and eggs and feel free to let us know what you think about this new kind of contest in the comments section below…enjoy!

Yael, our VP of Product and Online Marketing, recently participated in a discussion at Le Mobile 2.0 in Paris and talked a little about what’s going on behind the scenes at waze.  If you’d like to hear Yael’s take on what we do and where we’re headed, click on the above image to visit the Le Mobile website and watch the 17 minute clip…

Next time you find yourself strolling along Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto, CA, maybe sure to keep your eyes open for Waze’s US headquarters and our fancy new window! We’re all moved in and are busy cooking up all kinds of new promotions and partnerships to benefit our users…stay tuned guys!

Hey All – we know you guys are busy bees with all kinds of cool stuff going on and that it’s hard to find the time to create a video, but we expect great things from y’all (!) so we decided to extend the video demo contest by a week to offer more time to those of you who wanted to participate, but just couldn’t carve out the time to do so up to this point. Accordingly, here’s the new timeline we’re working with…

• Final entries due before midnight PST on April 15th
• Internal waze employee jury selection though the 17th
• Public voting period from April 18th – 22nd
• Three winners announced on the 25th

We only have a handful-and-a-half of entries up to this point (props to those of you who got your stuff in early – they’re great), so there’s a lot of space in the competition for ‘win’, and we encourage more of you to throw your hat into the race to vie for one of those three iPad2s we’re offering this time around. Make sure to read the initial blog post, linked above/a few blog posts below, for the requirements, and as much as we love your pretty faces, don’t forget to also spend a good amount of time focusing in on the app interface, itself, too…

Wishing luck to all of you guys who have, or who will be entering the contest – show us your stuff!